The Dutch Model

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ABSTRACT: LETTER FROM EUROPE about radical Muslim immigrants in Holland. In the fall of 2004, the day the Dutch filmmaker Theo van Gogh was murdered in Amsterdam by a Dutch-Moroccan Muslim fanatic, an artist in Rotterdam painted an angel on his studio window with the words “Thou Shalt Not Kill.” The police were called to the scene by an offended Muslim man and they ordered the artist to destroy the painting. It is an ur-Dutch story. Mentions the recent controversy over cartoons of the prophet Mohammed published in a Dutch newspaper. It is 17 years since Ayatollah Khomeini issued his infamous fatwa against Salman Rushdie, yet the West is still under attack for being itself-secular, democratic, and libertarian-and the threats now come from young male immigrants with laptops in cities like Amsterdam and Copenhagen. There are 15 million Muslims in Western Europe, and if you count illegal immigration there are more. Every country has had to concoct elaborate strategies not only for absorbing its Muslim immigrants, but for dealing with Islamic identity at its most insistent. Europe's young Muslims, frustrated in their prospects, are now being courted by fundamentalist mullahs and imams from North Africa and the Middle East, stirred by the rhetoric of the new Internet jihad. Mentions sociologist Albert Benschop, who tracks Islamist recruitment on the Internet. The Dutch still discuss their immigration problem in terms of van Gogh's murder. Describes van Gogh's killing as “ritual” and claims the killer, Mohammed Bouyeri, left a note proclaiming the imminent death of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, the Dutch-Somalian woman who wrote van Gogh's short film “Submission,” about the poor treatment of Muslim women. Tells about Web sites that are spreading jihad to thousands of Dutch Muslim children. Today, there are anywhere from 15-20 jihadist groups, many of them Moroccan, in Holland. It's safe to say that no country was as smug as Holland in its misreadings of its immigrants. There are 3 million immigrants there now; Muslims, mostly Moroccans and Turks, account for nearly 1 million, and 60% of all first-generation Turkish and Moroccan workers are unemployed. Describes how Dutch society isolated immigrants. Mentions Prime Minister Ruud Lubbers and Rinus Penninx, who implemented Holland's shortsighted immigrant policy in the 1980s. Paul Scheffer claimed that the immigrants' radicalization was linked to their isolation. Mentions Scheffer's controversial essay, “The Multicultural Drama” (2000). Mentions Jeb Cohen, Amsterdam's Jewish mayor, who claims the Dutch model is working. Mentions Mohamed Rabbae, the first Moroccan elected to the Dutch parliament. Moroccan feminist-radical author Miriyam Aouragh described Muslims as victims. Describes a plan to build a large mosque in Baarsjes in 2002. Mentions Baarsjes mayor Henk van Waveren. Immigration is now close to being the most important political issue in Holland. Holland has been run by a coalition of the right for the past 4 years. Rita Verdonk, the Minister for Immigration and Integration, believes the solution is to deport all immigrants. Tells about Ayaan Hirsi Ali, who first joined the left-wing Labor Party, then switched to the right-wing Liberal Party; she has nothing but contempt for the multicultural Dutch model. Of the van Gogh murder, she says, “The left was mugged by reality.” Mentions an evening of debates on Islam held at Rode Hoed; there were no practicing Muslims (or anti-Muslims) scheduled to debate. Holland remains preoccupied-and frozen-by van Gogh's murder. People there have begun to suspect that the peculiarly Dutch myth of a democracy integrated but not assimilated might be a dangerous fiction.